2022 Product Showcase: Kreg Foreman

Kreg Foreman. Pocket holes have become so, is it endemic or ubiquitous? I don't know. One of those words. Popular. How about that? There you go. I understood that one. Pocket holes have become so popular. And nothing wrong with using a pocket hole jig, but when you have eleventy billion pocket holes to do? When you're doing a lot of pocket holes and a great example would be, if you're doing face frames for a kitchen full of cabinets, you are going to drill a lot of pocket holes. That's where the Foreman comes in. So let's do, before we go to the video where we show a bunch of stuff, we'll do a little once-over here. So the way this works is that our material is going to go under that hold down, little bit of pressure from this. Lock that in place. And then when I pull the handle, the bit's going to come up and drill that pocket hole for us. And the benefit to this is that place, drill, place, drill. So in the video, we cover a lot of different aspects of the Foreman. So let's go right to that video, have a look at that. And then we'll come back and talk some more about this product. Unless you've been living under a rock, you probably already know that pocket holes are an incredibly fast and effective way to put material together. May not know about the Kreg Foreman. This is creating pocket holes on steroids. This is an incredibly fast way to create pocket holes. Here's the deal. When I pull this lever, the drill bit comes up from the table. My material would be registered against that fence. And of course the drill bit will be running, so it punches a hole in the back of our material. Here's how that looks. Position our material. Bring down the hold down. Lock that in place. Then... Lot of little things going on there. You may have heard a vacuum run when I ran the tool. I'm connected to a tool actuated vacuum, because there's really good dust collection internally on this unit. So it's not throwing any of the shavings from the hole that we're drilling up around the environment here. On the fence, there are a bunch of things going on. One, there are measurements on here that you can use to register the edge of your material and uniformly place it. The other thing that you can do is take advantage of the stops. They're spring loaded, so when you're not using them, you can just ride right over the top of them. When you do want to use them, you can come against the fence, come against the stop, create your hole, come against the fence. I've got another stop on this side, hit that stop, create the hole to control that spacing. So one of the things that's nice about this is you're not having to mark your pieces in order to call out where the pocket holes go, because that really is done automatically for you by the fence. Fence positioning comes into play depending on the thickness of material that you're working with. So the way that we control how that hole ends up in our material is by moving the fence back for thicker stock. That's the inch-and-a-half thickness position, and then moving it forward for thinner stock. So let's go back here to inch-and-a-half. Because we've got the capacity to go from inch-and-a-half to half-inch on the machine. So there I've got a thicker chunk of maple. Same, we'll get a little tension there. Lock that in place. Now the geometry of that, what's happening is it's controlling that hole position so that when the screw exits, it's exiting on the center of the thickness of the material. That's where your greatest strength in that pocket hole joint is gonna come from, is from having the screw centered on your material when it exits that. Now, we can keep it in the configuration it's currently in, which is there's a three-eighths drill bit in there. Or we can change the guide and go a step bigger to use heavier duty screws. We can change the guide and use a different drill bit to go a step smaller. So for your half-inch material it would also be nice to go to that smaller scale drill bit. And again, for your thicker material, you maybe want to step up to that larger-scale drill bit and guide, so that you can use a heavier duty screw, smaller screw. It's easy to see on this where your pocket hole is going to end up because we've got this guide in the table. It shows you really exactly what's gonna happen next. So in a case of this miter where I want to do pocket holes, I don't want the miter to... or I don't want the pocket hole to come through this edge over here. So first step, get my hold down set. And then just by watching the position of that guide in the table relative to the edge of my material, that's going to show me where that piece needs to go so that the hole doesn't exit that edge. Lots of cool stuff going on here. Very, very, very efficient way to cut pocket holes in a variety of thicknesses of material. And that's one of the cool benefits of this is it's not a one trick pony that's set up only for three-quarter inch face frames. It gives you the capability of putting pocket holes in many different thicknesses of stack. And of course, as I said, we can change the drill, change the guide to also accommodate smaller or larger screws beyond the three-eighths bit that's in there right now. Great repeatability from using the stops and from using the marks on the fence. So this really ups the game in the efficiency, the speed with which you can cut an already incredibly efficient joint. It's cool stuff. Pocket hole king. Let's do one here just to do one here. There. There. It's so fast. And of course, as you saw in the video, the fence can be adjusted. This can be adjusted. We can accommodate different thicknesses of material. It is a crazy quick way to put pocket holes in to your work.